1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image editing apparatus and method that edits continuous images such as motion pictures or continuous photograph images picked up by a video camera, a digital camera, or a mobile telephone with a camera.
2. Description of the Related Art
Japanese Patent No. 2833010 discloses a method of decomposing motion picture images picked up by an image pickup device such as a video camera, a digital camera, or a mobile telephone with a camera into still images for printing. This publication describes a print apparatus which loads a motion picture video from VTR or the like in the form of a plurality of frames and which prints the video as decomposed photographs. In connection with the loading of a plurality of frames for printing, the publication describes a method of specifying the time for which the desired video is to be loaded and the number of frames to be loaded so as to load a required number of images for the decomposed photographs in response to an operator's instruction to start loading.
However, for some motion picture scenes, it is unknown how long it takes to load scenes from which decomposed photographs are to be obtained.
Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 6-334954 describes a video printer which can print multi-stroboscopic images and which enables the selection of the first and last frames of multi-stroboscopic images to be printed.
Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2002-19213 describes a printer which can print a plurality of images on a sheet and which allows a user to select a layout of the images.
However, actually, it has been strongly desirable to edit and print the most desirable image portion of reproduced motion picture scenes together with its preceding and succeeding images.